[Iscool]

"Which means that at some point almost all cheetahs were killed, and the existing cheetahs are descendents of a very few related individuals"

Interesting concept...But wouldn't all Cheetahs have come from one original source, one Cheetah???

Or could it have been many butterflies that turned into many Cheetahs allowing for a variation in DNA???

But then maybe one butterfly turned into a Cheetah and one red-toed frog turned into a Cheetah and one shrew turned into a Cheetah...And this would account for a diversity of DNA...

Maybe some Cheetahs turned into blue-birds...Maybe ought to check some blue-birds for some corresponding Cheetah DNA...

Might want to check some Walleyes as well...Some of the Cheetahs could have turned into fish...

[RonF]

Interesting concept...But wouldn't all Cheetahs have come from one original source, one Cheetah??? No. At least not a single animal recognizable as a Cheetah today. Posit a feline animal with a broadly distributed population. Somewhere in that population an animal is born with a favorable mutation - say, something that enables it to run faster. It eats and gets out of danger better. So do it's kids. The mutation spreads throughout the area around the original progenitor. Note that this is not a cheetah - it's a faster proto-Cheetah. It can still breed with proto-Cheetahs. But as they increase in a particular area they'll also start to breed with each other. Now you have a very fast proto-Cheetah. They'll go through the same process of getting around and breeding with each other. What you end up with is a self-isolating population, as the new-and-improved models tend to breed with each other preferentially. Couple that with the accidents of rivers, mountains, rift valleys, large stretches of habitat incompatible with migration that provides physical isolation.

The result is not one animal being born with a species-specific genome, the "first Cheetah". The result is one or more genetic mutations that spread throughout a population and changes them all into Cheetahs together over a period of time.